


The rafters of heartbreak

by pr_scatterbrain



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, Indie Music RPF, Midtown, Music RPF
Genre: F/M, Immigration & Emigration, Internalised Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-25
Updated: 2012-07-25
Packaged: 2017-11-10 13:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr_scatterbrain/pseuds/pr_scatterbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A not-a-love-story love story for the disbelievers. (AU where Regina Spektor and Gabe grow up knowing each other).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The rafters of heartbreak

 

 

 

They both start out elsewhere. Elsewhere then becomes America.

They live on the same street. Gabe doesn't know her. But he knows of her. They’re about the same age, except she's nine to his four when she steps off the boat. Her first name is Regina. He doesn't know her last name. It's something Russian. Or was. Her parents could have changed it. It wouldn't be surprising if they did. He sees her around. Sometimes. That doesn't make her anything special though. He knows of most people. She's just one of many.

Her parents like his were something else back in their respective elsewhere’s. His much more so than hers. Both sets work minimum wage jobs and temp work. His parents work them longer, and in turn Gabe and his brother grow up without them more than with them. They have a babysitter sometimes. Sometimes they don't. It’s almost Halloween when Gabe turns ten. It takes her another year, but so does Regina. There are more birthdays after those. Some with parties, some with gifts that are eagerly awaited. Others that disappoint and that leave a bitter after taste. But there are no more babysitters after the tenth one.

Time passes as it has a habit of doing when one goes from being a child to not being one.

He sees her around sometimes. All skinned knees and homemade tablecloth dresses. She isn't the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood. That honour goes to Karina Tante. He makes friends and those friends have friends who know Karina. He spends the window of time between school finishing and his parents coming home, following her around and trying to convince her to let him get under her bra.

She laughs though, all golden and green eyed, and tells him, _‘No.’_ in a firm voice.

 

 

He keeps working on her though. He's fifteen when she says _'yes.'_ He walks home afterwards surrounded by his friends; the centre of attention and adoration. Those same friends laugh when they turn a corner and find Regina down on her knees in the gutter with one shoe unlaced, playing with some dirty kittens. They laugh louder when she looks up at them, dark eyed and baffled.

They keep walking.

Later he finds her sitting outside her apartment building, with long red scratches up and down her arms and three kittens in her lap.

"My father is allergic," she explains.

 

He sits next to her and takes the brindle kitten out of her arms into his. They don't live on the same street anymore. Gabe's father isn't working temp jobs and he isn't wearing clothes his mother made. He doesn't know what her parents are doing now, but she's not living on his old street either. They stay sitting in it though, for longer than they probably would have if they had someone waiting for them to return home. One of the kittens left in her arms paws at her messy hair. It's claws catch on the tangled ends, and it tugs.

He finds himself offering to find them homes. He doesn't know why.

Her eyes go every wide.

His heart does something stupid.

At around eleven o’clock the next night, she taps on his window and asks if they're okay (he doesn’t know how she knows where he lives).

"Yeah," he tells her. "They're fine."

His parents had agreed to take two. The other had gone to the receptionist at his father's practice. A week later he's made into a liar, when their next door neighbour accidentally hits the brindle cat. The guy's coming home from work, it's late and dark and he didn't see it - or so he said. Gabe doesn't tell Regina. He makes his brother swear to do the same. His friends don't make the same oath. But her parents are strict. She is their only daughter. Unlike Karina, they have no friends in common. So in the end it don't matter that much. Everyone apart from him seems to forget in a week or so.

 

(He still doesn't tell her though when she asks.)

 

When spring comes a few months later, Regina turns fourteen. Her parents send her away to Israel. They had saved and saved. His did too. They just saved for different things. When he next sees her, its summer not in Queens were they both started, but in the Bronx. He's with his latest girlfriend, Stephanie. She’s as tall as him, angular and had been all sorts of hard work to pin down. They had been on a grand total of three dates (not including the one they were on that day). Gabe has _high_ hopes. But in the corner of his eye, he sees Regina painting her toenails cotton candy pink up on the steps of her fire escape. And that, well –

"You moved," he says instead of a hello.

She blinks in the sun for a second or two, but smiles when she recognised him. "Not far," she tells him. "Are you still in Jersey?"

He nods. "Yeah. But my mother isn't."

The tone has a defiantly flippant edge, but he can see her blink and miss it.

Carefully, she buckles her feet into wedge sandals that he just knows her mother wouldn't like Regina wearing out in public and came down to the street level. She teeters on them a little, but not much. Her cord skirt flaps around her calves.

She catches him looking, and smiles.

It’s completely the wrong reaction to have. It annoys him. Or unsettles him. Maybe both, if he is honest (but he usually isn’t). By his side, Stephanie shifts her weight from foot to foot. He takes too long to introduce her to Regina. They about it fight on the train ride home.

 

A few months later he sees Regina again. She's just sixteen and he doesn't have a girlfriend anymore. He finds her crumbled up drunk in the corner of party. Her red lipstick is smudged and her ankles are bruised purple from those high heel shoes. She looks up at him with dark, doe eyes and – Her mother is thick and has cankles. He tells himself Regina will look like that one day.

He takes her home that night. Partly so no one else does. Halfway there, she vomits out the window. Her body heaves and the half open window cuts into her torso, right under her ribs. When he drives over a pothole, the motion jars her against it. When she cries her inky black eyeliner runs down her face and stains her cheeks.

 

After that night, he thinks her parents start locking her up more securely, or she gets better at evading them. Either way, he stops being sixteen earlier than her for reasons other than being born a year earlier. Where Regina had been playing the temple's piano (and everyone knew she had been), he learns how to play half assed bass and sort of sing. He starts and joins bands. Nothing lasts until one does.

 

(That one doesn't last either in the end, but at the time it feels like it could. And that really, is the only thing that matters).

 

He goes to university too. The band gets signed. They tour, make a record and a few other things. People know his name. And them more people do, and so on and so on. At least in theory. For the first time in his life, he has money in his bank account. It gives him a foolish sense of security when ends up back in New York in limbo between touring and recording.

People like Gabe. He's good at convincing them to keep on liking him. He has friends and people that he sometimes fucks and girls and guys numbers stored in his mobile. Famous girls and guys. Musicians and actors and people that magazine's concoct stories about. He doesn't have Regina's though. The fact only becomes apparent when they run into each other in the streets of New York.

She cocks her head to the side when she sees him and he sees her on 34th and 8th.

"I moved again," she explains without being prompted. Her voice sounds like it belongs in a hundred different places.

"Me too," he replies, then backtracks. "Or, I will once get around to moving my stuff from my dad's garage to my new place."

She smiles, as if he said something clever (or stupidly charming - it's most probably the later, but he's young and used to people siding with the former). She's still living with her parents, or so she tells him. Still playing classical music, still attached to the hip to the piano, still smarter than him and his whole social circle put together. She's still a lot of things.

But when he asks to see her new apartment, she says yes. It's bare and filled with unopened boxes – “Moving week,” she explains. “You caught me on the way to get more boxes” – and it echoes with only the two of them there.

 

They end up fucking on her parent’s unmade bed.

He isn't smart enough to question it. Things like her unsteady hands – pianist hands – and shallow, almost too rapid intakes of air don't register. It doesn't feel like a conquest when he enters her roughly nor does it feel like one when he zips his jeans back up. He's a little, not unsettled; that's not the right word. Off put perhaps? Ruffled maybe? Somethinged.

He doesn't tell his friends.

 

He sees her on the street again, a week or so later. Doe eyes and 1950s eyeliner in a thrift shop dress. He invites her to a party. She bites her lip. She asks when he'll pick her up. He didn't mean like that. But he opens his mouth and tells her ten instead of the truth.

"That's no good. I have practice with my piano teacher in the morning."

Her parents were musicians, he remembers after a beat. Or are. Unlike his parents, hers never really had to be 'were' anything’s. Not really. Not in any of the ways that mattered. There was a difference between having a Russian birth certificate and one from Uruguay. The wind catches her curly hair and blows it into her lipstick. It sticks. When she pulls it away, it's stained a different colour. She looks like Pete, almost. But not quite. Or not at all.

"Nine," he offers instead.

The sun is in Regina's eyes. It makes her squint. She looks a little like her mother.

"I wouldn't be able to stay long," she warns.

He shrugs. Uncomfortable. He doesn't need her too.

Depending on how honest Gabe is with himself, he can admit that he wanted to impress her; her, the seventh prettiest girl on the street neither of them lived on anymore, her, the girl who sat in the muddy gutter with kittens, her, the stupid smart girl he sort of knows and sort of still doesn't really like or dislike. But he doesn’t. He’s never been good with honesty. His has a track record to back it up.

He picks her up on time though. Exactly.

The party is mostly forgettable. In the green and yellow rayon dress her mother probably made and her rag tie curls, Regina sticks out like the high school charity case all over again. She doesn't get on with any of his friends. In fact, she hardly talks to any of them. In turn, they hardly talk to her. (He finds this out later and that is because he spends most of the night curled around Mikeyway. Nevertheless it annoys him. He saw her drunk and easy at Robby Jenkins graduation shindig. It doesn’t matter if she’s obeying curfew a few years too late. Regina isn't better than them or this.)

For no other reason than because he can, Gabe chooses act like he's become prone to acting and ditches her. He takes Mikey into an unoccupied room and fucks him hard and fast and leaves his body littered with bites and purple blue finger shaped bruises. An indeterminable amount of time later he emerges to find her waiting on the porch. Someone must have been providing her with alcohol, because when she gets up she sways into his arms.

"I'm going to be late for my lesson," she tells him in a slur. "My teacher doesn't like it when I'm late. She slaps my knuckles with a ruler and makes me work on my musical theory. I hate theory Gabriel, I really hate it."

She tells him other things, but her control on her not second or third or even forth language slips. He has no idea which one she ends up reverting too. It’s guttural and harsh. She sounds like her mother. He takes her home. When they get there he opens her car door and walks her up to her front door. She doesn't spare him a glance as she unlocks it. As he turns to walk back down the hall, he hears her deadlock the door behind him.

 

His band breaks up a few years later. Everyone apart from him sees it coming.

He resents this. Mostly because he’s young, but partly because there was a reason he was the only one blind about the situation. And for the not second or third or even forth time around, Gabe starts all over again with nothing but a myspace inspired idea and a new band made of borrowed line up, and then a completely different one; one that will last (he hopes; he doesn't pretend otherwise this time around).

In the middle of all this, but not connected to it in even the slightest way, Regina – all on her own – discovers music written during her and her parent's lifetimes. Some of it even made by people who are still alive and kicking. It blows her mind, just like discovering Mozart as a child did. For the first time in her life, she looks at blank pages of sheet music and fills them with anything but theory work. Nothing happens overnight. But slowly, gradually, a few homemade LP's start to circulate through the New York scene (not Gabe's, but the anti-folk one, Regina’s). Somehow the last occurrence surprises Gabe. The content of the CDs doesn't. She always was too smart for her own good. When her EP comes out it's more of the same. It sounds a bit like showing off to his ears. Or a bit like she's trying to hard. Either way it isn't good. But he isn't young like he used to be. It doesn't shock him that people have opinions that do not coincide with his.

 

It a long time before they are in the same place at the same time once more. It isn't anyone’s fault. Not even their own. When it happens, it happens because of Pete. Or his little tree house night club. Pete has a bigger mouth than Gabe, and word spreads fast. Fast enough to reach Gabe's brother, who passes it right on to a freshly back-in-town Regina.

She calls him up and Chinese Whispers never did anyone any favours and long story short, he ends up putting her on the guest list.

She still doesn't get on with any of his friends. It fucking pisses him off, because he _knows_ her. Okay, maybe Ashlee isn't the brightest spark in the room, but Regina doesn't just speak fifteen languages and compose concertos in her spare time. She isn't made of pure genius and T.S Elliot. She gets too carried away with what her voice can do. She over-writes her music. It's too laboured in parts. The lyrics sometimes get weighed down with too much meaning and too many references to poets and poetry and sometimes it sounds more like a 'concept score' than a song.

She doesn't get to look down on his friends.

And he knows that's what she's thinking as she sits herself right next to Travis and joins in the private conversation he and Patrick are having. She's still made of red lips and made up eyes. But though the dress she's wearing looks handmade, it certainly isn't homemade. Not anymore. The soft black lace of it sweeps around her; hugging her narrow shoulders and falling gently to those knees of hers that might still be pale, but are not longer covered in bandaids. It makes her look like all kinds of things that don't belong.

He catches by the bar when she goes to get a drink.

"Stop acting like you're different," he tells her, harsh and hurtful. "You not."

"But I am," she replies; confused, her head cocked to the side.

He hates girls who lie.

He leaves with William that night.

 

The next day Travis comments that he _‘Didn't know you two used to date,’_ and that _‘It was pretty uncool, blowing her off on your second first date.’_

“We didn't date.”

Travis raises one brow. "She was under the impression you did."

For some reason it's this that makes Gabe call her.

She is perplexed when he is sharp and loud with her.

"But we did. Remember the party?"

He hangs up on her.

 

Travis doesn't bring anything up until she performs a cover of one of his songs. It's meant to be a dance song. She makes it into a love song. Her voice twisting it into something sweet and aching instead of what he originally intended.

"She wasn't upset when you and Bill left together,” Travis says. “She said that was just what you did."

And maybe Gabe should have known (should have fucking guessed), but its only until in-between ones of Pete's frantic DJ set, Gabe realises that Regina had said a lot of things to Travis and a number of things to Patrick too. Also, one or two things to Ashlee. She catches him after Regina’s cover of _My Moves Are White (White Hot, That Is)_ (three different performances, seven shaky clips, one fan video, and two somewhat official ones) has more hits on youtube than the offical Cobra video.

"She said you always come back to her in the end," Ashlee tells him in a very specific tone of voice, after they watch one.

He wants to say or do something to Ashlee. There are many reasons he doesn't. Instead he laughs. Loud and bright and kind of too cruel considering everything he knows about her. The next chance he gets, he spreads lies and truths about Regina in the press. It reaches its head when her duet comes out with _The Stokes_. He knows her voice and she sings like she's fucking Julian, or maybe Albert, or maybe all of them. All at once. He says something akin that to anyone that care to listen (and some that don't). It becomes one of his best crudest jokes.

Until it doesn’t.

A tour and a half later (because that’s how Gabe counts time now), Pete sends him half a dozen links to articles and clips of Regina talking about how awesome Cobra Starship is. The fifth one is of Regina doing a cover of a Midtown song. At the start of the clip they ask her why she chose it.

 _'We grew up together,’_ she explains, her fingers already stoking the ivory keys of her borrowed piano. _'He's the best song writer I know.’_

She says other things.

The last thing she utters, right before she starts to play, implies that she was what the song was about.

 

He doesn't call her.

 

He's on tour when they meet again. But he's always on tour now and he's always running into the same old people no matter where he's at or heading too so maybe it isn't a surprise to anyone involved. She's on tour too. Neither of them are headliners. They’re both the second act. It happens when the two tour headliners happen to be sharing the limited VIP space in the same after hour’s club in Austria.

He hasn’t called her, still.

Regina’s wearing a beret when they spot each other (it suites her), and he's waiting from the waitress to return to his booth so he can order another drink. Looking up at her, it appeared as if someone convinced her to do something with her hair. He’s about to make a comment about it when she reaches out with one hand to trace the patterns on the velour of his orange and purple tracksuit with her fingertips. Her Mary Jane heels knock into his hot pink high tops when she steps closer to follow the pattern over his shoulder. She covers her mouth with her free hand and laughs.

"You look like you could glow in the dark," she tells him, her eyes dancing.

Putting her drink on his table, Regina follows the pattern up his collar and touches his neon yellow sweatband. Sweeping her fingers over his bangs and under the polyester, she slips his sweatband off his head. He doesn't know what she's doing or why, until she leans in and presses her lips against his. Her fingers curl into the back of his neck, and when she rocks forward against him, he wraps his hands around her thighs and helps her crawl into his lap.

Her mouth tastes like stage lights and half flat club soda. He kisses and kisses until his mouth is numb and smeared with her perennial crimson coloured lipstick.

He takes her back to the bus.

 

He wakes to find her talking with Elise. There was no reason for Regina to still be there, or to be talking to his keytarist. He tells her that after she calls her tour manager to organise a ride back to wherever she is meant to be.

"Elise isn’t going to last," Regina replies instead. "I can tell."

Gabe knows that. They all do. There is a reason Elise is on probation. He doesn't need Regina to tell him. It has been a long time since he got a real night of sleep. He can't remember the last time he did.

"She talks too much. You’re going to have to watch her.”

Regina squints into the sun, and she looks like a stupid kid. Or a groupie.

There are a lot of things he thinks of doing at that moment. There are many other things he could do - has done before. But he doesn't tell Regina to fuck off. He doesn't leave her to wait for her ride by herself either. A lot of people don't like him. A lot of people are only his friends by default, or maybe for the amusement of having an asshole friend.

In the end, the best he can do is an, "I know."

Regina takes his hand in hers. The last time a girl did that, fuck, he was a teenager. And together they sit on the curb and wait for her ride. When it comes, she hugs him goodbye – her arms tight and warm around him – and kisses him once more, bare lipped and chaste.

 

The next time she does a cover, it is of a Cobra song and the next time someone asks, he says the same thing; it sounds like it belongs to her, not him. But the tone he chooses to use when he says it is different. Then he stops saying things about her. Stops, just stops and eventually people stop asking questions. For a time. Mostly people start asking new questions; otherwise known as ones about VickyT replacing Elise.

 

Summer comes.

Gabe only notices because with it the festival season arrives and various contracted gigs and tours drags _Cobra Starship_ to places that are different instead of the same as the ones Regina is booked to play at. They don’t see each other at all for months. Instead they speak to each other. Across mobile lines her voice sounds a little younger, and her accent more muddled. She shouldn't have her mobile on, Regina tells him often; she shouldn't be talking to him, because she's working.

"Then why did you call me, if you're not supposed to?" he ask, but his tone is more like a taunt.

"I'm from Moscow and the Bronx," Regina replies, because it's true. "I can do whatever the fuck I want."

"And that's call me?"

"It is," Her voice is quiet.

"I'm writing a song," she adds after a beat.

He says something halfway encouraging - he hopes. Maybe a rote _‘Good for you’_ and maybe one without too much sarcasm. He doesn't know. He’s lost track. He doesn’t even know what town he’s currently in. But after a pause she laughs, too bright and brittle.

"It's about something that happened today."

"What happened?"

"I fell out of love with you."

And he's going through the motions until he –

Stops. Sudden and sharp and completed unexpected. She laughs again; too bright and brittle and wrong. He opens his mouth. Something cruel comes out. Something that was only one word long. Something that said it all.

Something that was –

"Liar.”

– True.

He hangs up on her. She doesn’t call him back.

 

He hears through the grapevine that is Pete, that she’s stopped working on her next album. Delays like writers block or tour exhaustion are cited (or more accurately, theorized) as the reasons. He feels stupidly pleased. He feels stupidly a lot of things. He isn’t a teenager anymore. He isn’t even young. And when he thinks about it, Gabe thinks maybe none of their random meetings were really that random. Not especially. Not when it counted at least. So he does what anyone would do if they could, and places himself in the right place, at the right time.

He shouldn’t, but he does. He’s always been selfish.

“I’m a liar too,” he tells her in the festival grounds that a continent away from the one he should have been standing in.

Her eyes are very dark and her mouth tightens. She looks like her mother. She looks nine and fourteen and sixteen and twenty nine and like her god damn _mother_ and almost exactly like the girl that is performing a song he wrote about her when he was in University and she looks at him straight in the eyes and fuck, _Regina_ , he’s always the last to know. _Always_.

She laughs the same laugh he’d heard across their last transatlantic phone call.

“Yeah,” Regina tells him. “Yeah, you are.”

 

 


End file.
